Senior Performance Engineer

Boston College Introduction

Founded in 1863, Boston College is a Jesuit, Catholic university located six miles from downtown Boston with an enrollment of 9,654 full-time undergraduates and 5,072 graduate and professional students. Ranked 37 among national universities, Boston College has 923 full-time and 1,336 FTE faculty, 2,822 non-faculty employees, an operating budget of $1.4 billion, and an endowment in excess of $3.9 billion.

Job Description

The Senior Performance Engineer spearheads the strategy for application scalability, capacity planning, and resilience. They will lead end-to-end performance initiatives, working across functional boundaries to ensure our systems are robust, responsive, and reliable. From developing sophisticated simulation scripts to performing deep-dive root cause analysis on production-level bottlenecks, they will be the primary advocate for a seamless user experience.

Primary Responsibilities:
* Performance Strategy & Frameworks: Lead the authoring and iteration of automated performance scripts and CI/CD integrations. Will own the instrumentation and telemetry strategy to ensure high-fidelity data capture.
* Shift-Left Engineering: Partner with developers and analysts from day one of the SDLC. Ensure performance requirements aren’t an afterthought but are documented and baked into the initial architecture.
* Proactive Monitoring & SRE Alignment: Anticipate and mitigate issues before they impact the user. Will leverage APM tools and profilers to maintain a pulse on system health and drive the resolution of complex concurrency and scalability bottlenecks.

Key Activities
* SRE Collaboration: Partner with Technical Services to establish SLOs and Error Budgets, balancing the need for rapid feature velocity with rock-solid system reliability.
* Self-Service Enablement: Design and build continuous performance testing capabilities that allow developers to execute tests in a self-service capacity within their own pipelines.
* Workload Modeling: Construct sophisticated workload models and simulations that accurately mimic real-world traffic to establish scalability benchmarks.
* Architectural Scrutiny: Participate in design reviews to identify performance risks in system integrations, database schemas, and application logic.
* Mentorship & Code Review: Lead code reviews for performance scripts and artifacts, ensuring the team adheres to industry best practices and maintains high-quality test suites.
* Deep-Dive Analysis: Utilize advanced profiling tools (e.g., Oracle Flight Recorder, JProfiler) to identify memory leaks, thread contention, and I/O bottlenecks.

Full-Time Equivalent Hiring Range: $110,150 to $137,700; salary commensurate with relevant experience.

Work Model: Hybrid. 3 days in-person required at the discretion of management.

Requirements

Education: Bachelor’s or Graduate degree in Computer Science, or a related technical field.
Experience: 6+ years of dedicated IT Performance Engineering/Testing experience.

Technical Stack:
Languages: Proficiency in Java, Python, or JavaScript.
Web Tech: Strong understanding of contemporary web architectures (Angular, CSS, XML, HTML5).
Data: Deep experience with relational databases (Oracle, PostgreSQL, MySQL) and query optimization.
Infrastructure: Experience automating testbeds on-prem and in Cloud environments (AWS/Azure/GCP).
Orchestration: Familiarity with containerization (Docker/Kubernetes)
Performance Test Tools: Strong background in load testing tools to script complex workloads. Grafana K6 scripting and experience is highly preferred.
Soft Skills: Exceptional ability to communicate complex technical findings to non-technical stakeholders.

Closing Statement

Boston College offers a broad and competitive range of benefits depending on your job classification eligibility:

• Tuition remission for Employees
• Tuition remission for Spouses and Children who meet eligibility requirements
• Generous Medical, Dental, and Vision Insurance
• Low-Cost Life Insurance
• Eligibility for both University-Funded 401k and Employer-Sponsored 403b Retirement Plans
• Paid Holidays Annually
• Generous Sick and Vacation Pay
• Additional benefits can be found on https://www.bc.edu/employeehandbook

Boston College conducts pre-employment background checks as part of the hiring process.

Boston College is an Equal Opportunity Employer and does not discriminate on the basis of any legally protected category, including disability and protected veteran status. Boston College’s Notice of Nondiscrimination can be viewed at https://www.bc.edu/nondiscrimination.